Hi, my name is Karen and it's been, er, zero days since I bought a Kindle. (This is where you all yell, "Hi, Karen" back at me, and then I confess I have no control over my eReader habit).

We are soon to be a 3-Kindle family. My husband has been using my Kindle 1, which he got me as a birthday/anniversary gift, and I then passed on to him when I got myself a Kindle 2. He will soon inherit my Kindle 2 when the Kindle 3 we just ordered (as a birthday gift from my husband to me) gets here.

You see how the progression illustrates the economics of eReaders? A Kindle used to be a double-occasion gift, and now it's just a really nice birthday gift.

I will be really interested to see how well the new Kindle stacks up. The jump from Kindle 1 to Kindle 2 made a lot of good stuff available. At first I was miffed they did away with the SD card, but actually, moving books from memory to the card was a pain. Kindle 2 also had faster page turns, and it was the first Kindle to read books out loud (unless the publisher has turned off that feature).

Kindle also 2 had much better navigation than Kindle 1. That little wheel was a pain to press straight down. It kept sliding on me. The only thing I really miss from the Kindle 1 is being able to tell if the wireless is on without taking the Kindle out of sleep mode and knowing that when the battery went, I could change it myself (it still hasn't needed to be changed, BTW). I'm hoping the controller on the Kindle 3 is even easier to manipulate.

Kindle 3 has twice the storage that Kindle 2 has. And I got the "graphite" version (meaning it's black instead of white). It looks prettier (smaller and even thinner!), and the battery lasts for an entire month if the wireless is off. I considered saving my husband $50 by getting the wifi only model, but I love the convenience of wireless delivery pretty much anywhere.

Now I can't wait for it to ship! Oh, the 12 steps in the subject line? That's the 12 steps to my mailbox, every time I check to see if my new Kindle has come yet!

Hah! For me that's how I get theater/concert tickets. I almost never buy them myself but I luck out when people who do buy them can't go. I've seen Judy Collins, Jay Leno, Evita, and Les Misérables that way.

I thought you had a Sony? Anyway, I will be sure to post about the new version once I get it, but it doesn't ship until the end of the month. I understand for UK sales that Amazon will actually ship from the UK this time, instead of from the US. I know you're in Ireland not the UK, but I'm assuming that's where yours would come from if you bought it.

Yeah, I have a Sony and it's grand. Except that I find it hard to get the books I want for it most of the time. Or else they cost more than the kindle versions for no good reason. That's why I *might* splash out. And yes, it would come from the UK -- there is no Irish Amazon site, unfortunately, unless you count a redirect from amazon.ie to amazon.co.uk :)

OK. One thing I am really interested in is the wifi, because previous Kindles have been 3G only. I'm wondering if using the wifi in a hot spot would make the Kindle actually usable as a web browser. Right now it's so slow I can't stand to use it. My phone is web-enabled, but the screen is too tiny to read anything long. So I'll let everyone know about that, too.

Sounds like a wonderful idea, but don't hold your breath on that one. So far the money is in making something people want in a way that means they can't get it anywhere else. Amazon even changed the power plug from the Kindle 1 to the Kindle 2, but I do think the second iteration is better.

In the Charlie Rose interview, Jeff Bezos was asked why they don't support ePub on the Kindle. He said that in order to do fast development of features like embedded notes (i.e., notes written by the reader, not author-written footnotes) they had to own the format. That sounds pretty convincing but they don't support converting ePub books to Kindle books, which they do for PDF, MS Word, HTML, and txt files. That should be easy enough to do but it would make it easier to get books form somewhere besides Amazon.